Present-day wafer processing often requires chemical reactions that take place in process chambers. The process chambers are a vacuum environment where intended chemical reactions occur under controlled conditions. Process chambers have many functions: controlling how gas chemicals flow into and react in the chamber in close proximity to the wafer; maintaining a prescribed pressure inside the vacuum environment; removing undesirable moisture, air, and reaction by-products; creating an environment for chemical reactions such as plasma to occur; and controlling the heating and cooling of the wafer.
Wafer manufacturing environments may include processing tools that are clustered as one main traffic chamber with a number of process chambers. Each of the process chambers may run the same wafer process (recipe) in parallel to improve the manufacturing throughput. Alternatively, each of the chambers may run different wafer recipes in sequential order. Processing tools are constantly generating events recorded by an event log. Each tool generates an event log that records an extensive amount of event data such as alarms (e.g., to stop a process), warnings (e.g., approaching sensors, limits), or traces (e.g., indicating the occurrence of an activity and/or type or activity). When a fault or alarm occurs on a tool, it may not be readily known whether the cause of the fault or alarm is due to the hardware (i.e., the tool or tool component) running a process recipe or due to the wafer process recipe itself.
Process engineers working on the recipe process and equipment support or tool support engineers working on the hardware must manually analyze event logs to reach a determination of the cause of the fault or alarm. However, such an analysis has proven to be both labor intensive and error prone, resulting in an inefficient use of tool event logs.